Sorry England, football isn’t coming home... and here’s why
SHOULD England become champions of Europe by beating Italy tomorrow night, historian Ged O’Brien wants one thing to be known. Football is resoundingly not coming home.
Currently writing a book called The Scottish Game: How Scotland Invented Modern World Football, O’Brien has never signed up to the ‘Anyone But England’ supporters’ club.
Raised in Southampton, a corner kick from the old Dell, he moved to Glasgow in 1990 to study the feasibility of a Scottish Football Museum project.
In the three decades since, his life has been dedicated to telling the story of the Scotch Professors, the Scottish footballers who moved to England in the late 19th Century and reinvented the way the game was played.
Yesterday marked the 154th anniversary of the day Queen’s Park were founded. There and then, he claims, the direction of modern football changed.
Doing his bit to rewrite the myths surrounding the development of the professional game, O’Brien tells Sportsmail: ‘I did Off the Ball a couple of years ago and they asked me what I thought of the song Three Lions with the line: Football’s coming home.
‘I just said: “It’s a flat lie”. What I’m trying to do is guide people and tell them: “Guys, I’m sorry, but football is not coming home, because Scotland invented it”.
‘Furthermore, I am afraid you either stole the history of Scottish football and appropriated it as your own — or smothered the history of Scottish football to the same end.
‘When I teach seniors in my higher history unit on how Glasgow invented modern football, the question they always ask me is: “How is it we don’t know this”?
‘And I have to tell them to answer that question themselves. Why is it they don’t know their own history?
‘But how would they? There are no books telling you that Scotland invented the modern passing game.
‘That is dealt with in the book I am writing at the moment. Football history has gone badly wrong.’
Currently involved in a project to excavate the foundations of the first and original Hampden Park pavilion — work starts again in September — O’Brien’s passion for the history of football is messianic.
‘Andrew Watson is the first black international footballer,’ he said. ‘He played the passing and running game which the English called the game of the Scotch Professors.
‘The first international between Scotland and England in 1872 would have been an absurd culture shock to the English players. They dribbled, someone tackled them and they kicked the ball forward. It was like a swarm of angry bees rushing around. Scotland had a different culture.’
O’Brien argues that the evolution of modern football from a game of kick and rush to a more structured passing game started on the day Scotland’s oldest senior club, Queen’s Park, was formed in 1867.
‘Queen’s Park brought together the idea that you move the ball up and down the pitch, passing it to one another,’ he adds.
‘So, when Scotland played England in 1872, the Scots moved and passed the ball and the English players must have thought: “What in God’s name are they doing”?
‘You can’t get around the core fact that Scotland and England were playing two entirely different codes of football.
‘After 1872, the new Lancashire and Yorkshire clubs paid Scots to come down and teach them the new scientific game.’
The story of the Scotch Professors was told in the Julian Fellowes’ Netflix series The English Game.
Essentially the story of how Fergie Suter and Jimmy Love left Partick FC (not Partick Thistle) to move south and become pioneers of the modern professional game, O’Brien says: ‘I was delighted to see a broader audience learn that. Not enough people realise they helped to change football.
‘After watching England being surgically dissected by the Scotch Professors, Pa Jackson of the English FA realised he had to find a way to copy it by founding Corinthians, the London club credited with championing the ideals of amateurism.
‘The creation of Queen’s Park was the actual start of modern world football in my view. If anyone is looking for the home of modern football, the search should begin and end in the city of Glasgow.’